End of summer visitors
Matt Huston and Sherry Smith of Seattle visited while on their way from a Telluride wedding to the Maroon Bells Wilderness. Unfortunately, it was a Sunday, so we got only a note: “It was good to see you weren’t working and that you take days off.”
Jack Laughlin, an engineer who commutes between Borrego Springs, Calif., and the Denver area, came by during the week and found us at work.
Robin Ann Corton of St. Paul, Minn., couldn’t visit, but she sent us the top half of her Aug. 8, 1994, issue. The bottom half had been “eaten” by the mails. “Could you please replace it? It looks like a good one, as are all the others.”
Carl Leathers, a 20-year subscriber from Nashville, Tenn., dropped by with a friend, Sally Draper. Carl says he first ran across the paper on a trip to Wyoming and has read “every word of every issue” since. Timber companies that once clearcut the West have moved to the South, he says, and are now felling 100,000-acre chunks of Tennessee to feed chip mills.
Rosemary and Douglas Moore from North Adams, Mass., also traveled great distances to visit HCN. Douglas is a former Midwesterner who teaches music at Williams College and hopes to someday move to the West.
Heading for the Black Canyon of the Gunnison and a week’s vacation were Larry Colbenson, a Denver attorney who specializes in hazardous waste, his son, Mark, and Margie Freedman, who works for United Way. They risked eye strain watching this expanded-to-24-page paper as it was getting laid out on light tables.
Odds and ends
We can all celebrate this anniversary Sept. 30: Thirty years ago, Lyndon Johnson signed the Wilderness Act into law, and it is amazing today to read its vivid language, which preserves areas “where the earth and the community of life are untrammeled by man, where man himself is a visitor who does not remain.”
Congratulations to free-lance writer and photographer George Wuerthner and to his wife Mollie Matteson on the birth of their first child on July 4. The couple named their daughter Summer.
HCN poetry editor Chip Rawlins has published a useful little book, Stream Channel Reference Sites: An Illustrated Guide to Field Technique. Co-authors are Cheryl Harrelson and John Potyondy, illustrations are by Hannah Hinchman, and it is available from the Rocky Mountain Experiment Station, Forest Service, 240 West Prospect Rd., Fort Collins, CO 80526.
Raymond Evenson of Meeker, Colo., sent a picture of a tractor baling hay, with a forest fire in the background. His caption: “You have to make hay even if there is a fire.” And Kathleen Menke sent us some photos of the Blackwell fire on the very edge of McCall, Idaho.
Former intern and present law student Devin Odell is moving from Orinda, Calif., to Ulaanbaator, Mongolia, where he and spouse Maria Fernandez-Gimenez will live in a gir (that’s Mongolian for yurt) while she pursues a Ph.D. and he looks for work tending sheep.
We hear the Wyoming Outdoor Council plans aerial tours of the proposed mega-gold mine in the heart of the Yellowstone ecosystem. The overflights are part of the group’s annual meeting Sept. 17 in Cody, Wyo. Call 307/332-7031 for details.
Mistaken identity
A reporter for the Rocky Mountain News telephoned Tikkun, a small magazine in New York City, to inquire about a conference the magazine was putting on. “Oh,” said the person who answered at Tikkun. “The Rocky Mountain News. I’ve heard of that. Are you based in Paonia?”
No, answered the reporter for the News. “We’re the Rocky Mountain News – the largest daily in Colorado – and we’re based in Denver. You’re thinking of High Country News.”
* Ed and Betsy Marston, for the staff
This article appeared in the print edition of the magazine with the headline Dear friends.
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